Cleaner (2025)

Martin Campbell has spent decades assembling thrillers with the tidy competence of a man who knows exactly which screws go where, and Cleaner is another such assembly. Daisy Ridley plays Joey, an ex-soldier turned window cleaner suspended fifty storeys up a Canary Wharf tower while armed radicals seize the gala below. It is Die Hard with a squeegee, and the film never pretends otherwise. The supporting cast is notably multiracial, and the film treats this with the shrug of a production that simply hired good actors. No ceremony attends it. The action heroine at the center is capable and out-fights her male antagonist, though the screenplay never stops to announce what this means, which is its own small mercy.

The villains own an energy company that preaches renewables while poisoning the world, and they host a lavish gala while doing it. That is a recognizable portrait of corporate predation, and the film lets it stand. The activists who storm the building are no better. Their leader speaks of exposing hypocrisy, and his second-in-command murders him to pursue something uglier. The result is a muddle of sympathies that reads as accidental, not editorial. The film wants a body count, not a manifesto.

Where Cleaner does something less common, it concerns Michael, Joey's autistic older brother, an online anti-corruption crusader whose research skills prove decisive in the climax. He is competent, central, and never reduced to a lesson. The film's restraint elsewhere is consistent: it gestures at environmental rot and plutocratic greed without stopping to scold anyone. That refusal to sermonize is the most surprising thing about it. A competent thriller, then, and a quiet one.